Rejoice!

Charlotte Collins Reed
Christ Episcopal Church
October 12, 2014

23 Proper A

I have a new appreciation for parables about wedding banquets now that one of our sons has married.  While I may deal with weddings fairly regularly on a professional level, I deal with marriage preparation, not wedding preparation.  I had no idea what goes into all the preparation for a wedding banquet-choosing flowers, coordinating colors, tasting all sorts and conditions of food, deciding on the cake, icing and filling flavors, how many layers and what shape the cake should be, what food should be served, how the room should be decorated, what kind of flooring is needed for the dancing and on and on and on.  Then, of course, I had to figure out what I was going to wear.  The mother of the bride said she would wear something she would wear to church.  The mother of the groom did not find this a helpful option.

When the big day finally arrived, all the planning and preparation came together to say to all the guests "Come, rejoice with us."  Come, enter into the feasting, the toasting, the laughing and the tears, and the dancing.  The hard work of preparation was done so that everyone who came could enter fully into the joy of the occasion.

This morning we hear about a king who throws a wedding banquet for his son.  But once the king, or more likely the king's servants, had made all the preparations made for the wedding banquet and the great day arrived, no one showed up.  Not one single guest.  Perhaps the guests did not understand that the feast was ready and the food was getting cold, so the king sent more servants to repeat the invitation.  But the guests still did not come.  The situation escalates when the guests who were not too busy with their farming or business took the time to seize the slaves, mistreat them and kill them.  That is a rather drastic way to send back an RSVP with regrets!  In a further escalation, the king sent his troops, destroyed the murderers, and burned down the whole city.  By now the banquet must be either stone cold, or burned to a crisp.  But the king is determined to throw a wedding banquet for his son.  So the king sends the servants to bring people in off the streets to feast at the wedding banquet and soon the hall was filled with guests.

If the parable just ended there, we would have a bizarre parable with a clear message.  If we don't come to the table when God calls, God will call someone else.   We would have a fairly happy ending to a rather violent story since the story would end with the wedding hall filled with guests.  But the parable does not end there.  The hall is finally filled with guests, who have put down whatever they were doing and come at the very last minute.  The king can finally relax and enjoy his son's wedding banquet, even though the son does not have so much as a cameo appearance in the parable.  But instead, the king confronts the one poor soul who somehow got into the wedding hall without wearing a wedding robe.  "Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?" The poor guy is speechless. The under dressed guest had just come in off the street and is probably stunned by the inquisition.  So the king says to his attendants "Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.' There is no pleasing this king!

Moses has to deal with another party this morning that does not go much better than the king's wedding banquet.  When Moses is on the mountain with God longer than the people expected, the people think Moses has disappeared forever and they need a new plan.  They convince Aaron, Moses' brother, to make them a god they can actually see.  So Aaron takes makes a golden calf for them out of their jewelry.   Once the calf has been completed, Aaron calls a festival for the Lord and the people spend a whole day offering burnt offerings and sacrifices of well-being to the calf, and the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to revel.

God's anger in the story of the golden calf rivals the anger of the king in the parable of the wedding banquet.  God tells Moses to step aside so that God's wrath may burn hot against the people and God can consume them.  In the case of the Hebrew people, Moses is able to intervene on their behalf and God relents, but the party is over.

God is angry because the Hebrew people have made and worshiped a golden calf, when they are to have no other gods but the God who brought them out of bondage in Egypt.  That anger makes sense.  But the king in the parable burns with anger because a wedding guest is not wearing the proper clothes.  That anger does not make sense since the guest had no time to prepare for the occasion.  But a proper wedding garment would likely have been offered to the guest before entering the banquet hall.  By failing to wear the appropriate wedding garment,  the wedding guest has failed to enter fully into the king's joy at the marriage of the king's son.  The wedding guest has not surrendered himself to the sheer joy of the occasion.  The Hebrew people have incurred God's wrath by rejoicing in their own creation.  The wedding guest has incurred the wrath of the king by failing to enter into the joy of the king.

The apostle Paul says "Rejoice in the Lord always.  Again, I say, rejoice." Paul is stating a requirement, not offering a suggestion.  God calls us to rejoice with God, not because life is always pleasant, but even when life is hard, because God is always with us.  God calls us to rejoice, not just when all our work is done and rejoicing is convenient, but in all time and in all places.  God calls us to rejoice, not half-heartedly like the under dressed guest in the parable, but with our whole selves.  When we fully surrender ourselves to rejoice in the God who created us, the apostle Paul tells us that we will know the peace of God which passes all understanding.

Amen.

Crazy with Love

Charlotte Collins Reed
Christ Episcopal Church
October 5, 2014

22 Proper A

As a teenager, I came to the Episcopal Church and stayed because my local Episcopal Church both proclaimed and lived the love of God.  Not only did the very small parish include all sorts and conditions of people, all of whom were loved, but the church also used one half of their very small budget to reach out into the community.  The building itself was truly one of the ugliest church buildings I have ever seen.  The building had been a pool hall in a former life and not a lot had changed.  But in that pool hall turned church, the love of God was proclaimed, week in an week out, then the people went out into the world to live as people who knew they were loved.

In the Episcopal Church we understand that we do God's work in the world out of gratitude for God's love rather than out of fear of God's wrath.  Our principle act of worship is the Eucharist, which is the Greek word for Thanksgiving.  We do not fear for our eternal life, which is a gift we receive in baptism and nothing we can earn, but work to make this world look a bit more like heaven.  And we do that work, not because we fear that God will smite us if we are lazy but because we are called to seek and serve Christ in all people in grateful response to the love of God shown to us in Jesus.

The proof of God's love for us comes not out of our imaginations, or out of any psychology that wants us to feel good about ourselves, or out of our desire to avoid talk about judgement.  The proof of God's love for us comes straight from Scripture.  This morning, Jesus tells us a parable that is essentially a love song, which reminds us of a passage from the prophet Isaiah. When Jesus said "There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it and built a watchtower," we are reminded of similar words from the prophet Isaiah "Let me sing for my beloved a love song concerning his vineyard.  My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill.  He dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he built a watchtower in the midst of it, and planted it with choice vines, and he hewed out a wine vat in it."

At first, Jesus' parable does not appear to be telling us anything Isaiah has not already said.  But in the passage from Isaiah, God's lovesong turns very ugly, very quickly.  God's vineyard fails to yield anything but wild grapes, and so God is going to destroy the vineyard and make it a waste.  God expected justice from God's people, but saw bloodshed, and God expected righteousness, but heard a cry.  Isaiah warns the people that they have strayed far from being the people God called them to be, and the consequences will be disastrous.

When those gathered around Jesus heard him say "There was a landowner who planted a vineyard" they thought they knew what was coming.  Disaster.  After all, Jesus was talking to the chief priests and elders of the people, with whom he was not exactly seeing eye to eye, but who did know their Bible.  Instead, what they get is a story about a landowner who is so in love with the tenants that the landowner is down right irrational.  Listen to what the landowner does.  When the harvest comes, the landowner sends slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. But the tenants beat, stone, and kill the slaves.  A rational person would call the police.  But the landowner sends more slaves, thinking that the second set will be treated better.  The landowner must be crazy with love to think that makes any kind of sense at all.  And, indeed, the tenants treat the second group of slaves just as badly as they did the first group.  No big surprise there.  At this point, the landowner needs to hire an attorney.  But in an action that completely defies common sense, the landowner sends his son, thinking the tenants will respect the son.  Seriously? And what happens? The tenants say "This is the heir.  Come let us kill him and get his inheritance."  Now, no one is thinking straight.  The landowner, willing to go to any lengths to win over the tenants, sends his son. The tenants think that the prize for murder is the inheritance.

At the end of the parable, after the tenants have killed the Son,  Jesus asks "Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to the tenants?"  The chief priests and elders display the first bit of logic in the passage and their knowledge Scripture when they answer "He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at harvest time."  However,  Jesus says to them "Have you never read in the scriptures: "The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord's doing, and it is amazing in our eyes?"  When the landowner comes, it will not be to destroy, but to create.  Where the tenants have created death and destruction, the landowner will build something new.

Does God love us so much, then, that we can do whatever we like?  Clearly not, as we hear in the reading of the 10 commandments from the book of Exodus this morning.  God gives the people the 10 commandments so they, and we, will know the kind of behavior that is expected of them, and us.  But the 10 commandments are much more than a list of laws.  Listen to what God says first: "I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery."  God begins by telling the people, and us, who God is.  God is the One who brought the people out of bondage in Egypt.  God's identity for the people cannot be separated from what God did for the people.   Then God goes on to tell the people who they are by telling them how they are to live.  Their identity as people of God cannot be separated from their actions either.  The 10 commandments are about identity more than rules.  This way of life sets God's people apart from other people and reminds the people continually that they are the people of the God who led them out of bondage.  They live out the commandments because they are God's people, not to appease God or get God to do something for them.

When Jesus says "the Kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom" Jesus is saying that our lives are to bear the fruits of the kingdom-not because we are afraid of God, but because we are grateful for all that God has done for us.  We are not to live like the tenants in the vineyard who thought that, somehow, the fruit of the vineyard was theirs to do with as they liked.  The fruit of the vineyard belongs to God, and that fruit, the prophet Isaiah tells us, is justice and righteousness.  When Jesus was crucified, when the Son of the vineyard owner was killed, God's answer was not to kill and destroy God's people.  God's answer was resurrection and new life.  God calls us to lives our lives in response to that love, producing the fruit of the kingdom, not out of fear, but out of gratitude.  By our lives of gratitude, we will know that we belong to God, who loves us with crazy, irrational love.

                                                                    Amen.